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Diagnostic practice · Research-first
Shanelle Roberts, researcher and systems designer

You can see the revenue leaking.
You can't prove where.

So you can't fund the fix. I find the exact place your acquisition system loses revenue it should be keeping, score it, and attach a number you can take into the room where budget gets decided.

Twenty years in UX research and systems design, including institutional fintech. You work with me directly. Not an account team.

My Approach
Shanelle Roberts, researcher and systems designer

Brands I've worked with

Expedia The Home Depot T-Mobile Microsoft Wilmington Trust M&T Bank UN World Food Programme Allrecipes General Assembly
200+ Healthcare Practices Researched
20 Years Product and Systems Design Experience
6 Proprietary AI Agents Built
1 U.S. Utility Patent at T-Mobile
The Pattern

You have the traffic. You have the product.
What you don't have is the system between them.

01
The bind you already feel

You can see the before and after in your own metrics. You can't draw a clean line from interest to revenue. So every time budget or headcount comes up, conviction loses to whoever brought a number.

02
Why it keeps happening

This is structural, not a people problem. No one owns the handoff between what marketing, design, and tech produces and where revenue gets earned. The conversion layer between interest and the conversation that closes it was never formally built.

03
What a diagnosis is

Not activity. A scored, finite, board-ready read of where your acquisition system breaks and what closing the gap is worth. You take it into the room and have a real conversation about money, not advocacy.

About Shanelle

Twenty years inside enterprise design.
Now outside it.

I spent 20 years in design and tech. I've worked solving design problems across enterprise organizations including T-Mobile, Expedia, Microsoft, Wilmington Trust, the Home Depot, and Allrecipes. I've watched the same design and customer acquisition gaps show up regardless of business vertical. I've been a part of Design teams doing real work with little architecture connecting it to business outcomes. The work included multiple awards for innovation and a U.S. Utility Patent while working at T-Mobile.

This is a major gap across verticals. It isn't a design quality problem. It's a structural one. The system connecting design decisions to revenue, client acquisition, and business growth was never built. I lived that from the inside long enough to understand exactly why it persists and why it's nearly impossible to fix from within.

Now that I'm outside of it, I'm positioned to diagnose it without the political constraints that make internal advocacy so costly, and to advocate for design earning the structural role it needs to drive the outcomes it's being asked to deliver.

Read my approach
Why One Person

You work with the person
who does the diagnosis.

You've hired vendors who delivered activity instead of results. Reporting without attribution. A senior person who sold the work and a junior team who delivered it. Two quarters of motion, then quietly retired.

A diagnosis doesn't work that way. It comes from one senior practitioner who has looked at the system, not a committee of associates billing hours. That's the structure here. The audit is principal-delivered by design, because a finite, senior read is exactly what it should be.

The work is scoped and time-boxed. You aren't betting on capacity. You're buying a senior read of where your system breaks and what it's worth to fix. As the practice grows, implementation scales through a vetted team. The diagnosis stays mine.

What you can ask to see
  • A redacted sample finding from a prior audit
  • The scoring rubric behind every diagnosis
  • The board-ready format your team will receive
How I Work

Fixed fee. Defined scope.
No moving targets.

Most consultants will say almost anything to win the engagement. I would rather lose it than oversell it.

Under-promising and over-delivering isn't a slogan here. It's the structure. Every engagement is fixed-fee, with a defined scope and named deliverables, so both sides know exactly what to expect before any work begins. No expanding bills. No quietly growing scope. No surprises at the end.

Ambiguity is where trust goes to die. It wastes time and produces bad outcomes. A clear scope protects you, and it protects the work.

This is also how I choose who I work with. I want clients who are aligned on values, not just ready to sign. The fit comes before the contract, because the work only holds when both sides are honest about what they're building and what it takes to get there.

How I Think and Lead

Two principles that shape every engagement.

On AI

AI is a force multiplier. Not a replacement.

The risk in business is not AI itself. It's organizations that use AI to cut the humans who hold the relational and ethical weight of care. I believe AI should make the people in the room significantly better at their work. The human drives the strategy and makes the judgement call because they bear the responsibility for the outcomes AI produces.

Read more on my approach →
On Leadership

Loyalty is the operating principle.

Loyalty means I tell you what's true even when it costs me the engagement or future work. The scope I agree to is the scope I protect. The findings I deliver are what the data shows, not what would make you more likely to hire me next.

Read more on my approach →
Start Here

If you can see the leak and can't prove it,
that's the entire reason this exists.

A 30-minute conversation to determine fit. No pitch. No deck. Just the right conversation about where your acquisition system is losing revenue, and whether a diagnosis is the next step.

No obligation · No sales deck · Just the right conversation